Category: Artist Profile

Source: Bandcamp Daily. Now at 80 years of age, trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith refuses to narrow his expansive vision. The last 10 years have been the most prolific of his five-decade career, with multiple releases per year, many of them epic in both concept and scale. He’s a player with an incisive and expressive tone…

Source: The Spectator. At the same time, inspired by the post-war developments in avant-garde and electro-acoustic music, Xenakis worked on becoming a composer. He developed a novel approach to orchestral and electronic music based on dynamic sound masses. The string orchestral work Pithoprakta (1955-56), for example, features shifting groups of pizzicato and struck wood, while…

Source: Bandcamp Daily. Few jazz artists have cast their net as widely as pianist Vijay Iyer in terms of song selection. Across his discography, Iyer has taken on his jazz heroes in Thelonious Monk and Steve Coleman to pop/R&B royalty in Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder to modern glitch and hip-hop in Flying Lotus and…

Source: The Shfl. Understanding the conceptual underpinnings of Braxton’s music is key to wrestling with his massive discography. His work can be grouped under a few umbrellas, though there are outlier albums in every era. In the 1970s, he first led a group with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, violinist Leroy Jenkins, and percussionist Steve McCall;…

Source: The Baffler. I HAD CHOSEN EIGHTY-EIGHT as my starting point as there are eighty-eight-minutes of previously unreleased material on Cecil Taylor: The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert. And as there are eighty-eight keys on the piano, the instrument that Taylor played like no other artist before or since. That makes for a mystical coincidence.…

Source: The New York Times. Éliane Radigue lives and works in a second-floor apartment in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris. A weeping fig tree looms above her head; across the loft-like room are three large windows adorned with house plants. The windows face a school across the street which, she wrote in a recent email,…

Source: newworld-records. This second part of our series–in conjunction with Tudor’s 96th birthday–charts the immensely consequential, yet relatively short, period of time during which Tudor, as interpreter extraordinaire, was to quote Frank Hilberg, “the eye of the hurricane” of avant garde composition, both in America and Europe. Tudor effectively ceased performing the music of other…

Source: Rolling Stone. An upcoming documentary will provide a rare look at the inner workings of King Crimson, one of rock’s most respected but also mysterious bands. Titled In the Court of the Crimson King, after the group’s legendary 1969 debut, the film will premiere at South by Southwest this March, and a new trailer…

Source: New World Records. On the occasion of what would have been his 96th birthday, we take a look at the work & career of the titan of 20th century music—pianist, composer, innovator David Tudor. Definitive versions of many of Tudor’s most seminal—and also more recondite—recordings are available via New World Records, giving a representative…

Source: Chicago Reader. Since the 1950s, Chicago has hosted a succession of visionary Black musical groups and societies. They’re best known as purveyors of avant-garde jazz, but that characterization sells short Sun Ra and his Arkestra, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and Phil Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble. Each was—and in some…

Source: The Guardian. If you happened to be gazing idly from a window of New York City’s J train crossing the East River on the Williamsburg Bridge, most days between the summer of 1959 and the autumn of 1961, you might have glimpsed a lone saxophonist huddled into a cranny of the gigantic steel skeleton.